mei > mei's Quotes

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”
― Frida Kahlo

“Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Great Gatsby

“I was fifteen. I was bored. I was miserable.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.”
― Margaret Mead

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“What of Art?
-It is a malady.
--Love?
-An Illusion.
--Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
--You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
--What are you?
-To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde , The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You think of yourself
as a citizen of the universe.
You think you belong
to this world of dust and matter.
Out of this dust
you have created a personal image,
and have forgotten
about the essence of your true origin”
― Rumi, Hush, Don't Say Anything to God: Passionate Poems of Rumi

“Language learning is one of the most intensely personal journeys you can undertake. You are going into your own mind and altering the way you think.”
― Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It

“You tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.”
― Warsan Shire

“You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“In one of those stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night. And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend...I shall not leave you.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Ne se mettre à genoux que pour cueillir une fleur.”
― Jacques Brel

“good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws”
― Plato

“No one has ever become poor by giving.”
― Anne Frank, diary of Anne Frank: the play

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.”
― Thomas Pynchon

“When does real love begin?

At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity.

At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love?

At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession.”
― Anaïs Nin, Fire: From A Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“If I'm engrossed in a book, I have to rearrange my thoughts before I can mingle with other people, because otherwise, they might think I was strange.”
― Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of Anne Frank / Excerpts from Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained

“The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.”
― Frantz Fanon